Elizabeth May: A Response to Comments on East Anglia Emails

Elizabeth May: A Response to Comments on East Anglia Emails

Last week, in response to the hacked emails at East Anglia, Elizabeth May took the time to read every single email.

Providing context and analysis, her report goes a long way, giving us more than just the cherry picked nuggets that skeptics have taken out of context and doggedly been holding on to.

Here, she follows up with a response to the comments on her original posting…

DeSmogBlog comments require response:

I am a neophyte in the blogosphere. The first time something I have written for the Green Party site has been widely picked up was my article on the East Anglia scientists and the stolen emails. James Hoggan, Kevin Grandia, and Richard Littlemore do a powerful lot of good on “DeSmogBlog” and through James’ and Richard’s new book Climate Cover-Up.

Posting my CRU email blog on the DeSmogBlog site got it some attention, including in the New York Times. Reading some of the posted comments led me to want to rebut and share that rebuttal with Greens. You may need these points to do your own sand-bagging against the rising tide of skeptic/contrarian propaganda. Here is a sample of the nonsense with my response…

Ms May, with all due respect this is pure nonsence.(sic)

If you read the entire set how come you missed the emails of threats to those at ClimateAudit? How come you missed the one where they cannot account for the current cooling? Or how about the MANY where they conspire to black ball journals that keep publishing skeptical papers, get certain editors removed, and changing the peer reviewed process?

Or how to change the data mixing unrelated data, that hides the decline the treering data showed after 1961? How come you did not comment on these? JR Wakefield

Thanks to JR Wakefield, (although the message “with all due respect” would ring more sincerely if your headline had not been, “Lizzy, you missed the juicy stuff.”)

My point is there is no “juicy stuff.” There are intemperate messages from people writing in private about the levels of frustration created by years of harassment. None of us like to be besieged. Few of us have had to endure the levels of targeted harassment of the scientists in the CRU group at East Anglia.

There is one message where a colleague expresses concern that the models do not seem to account for the where the heat forcing of the trapped solar energy is going.

The discussion is started when Dr. Stephen Schneider, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, expresses concern that the BBC is mis-leading the public on current science:

Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and sampling errors to this new “IPCC Lead Author” from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary–presumed–vacation worth a few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another dramatic upward spike like 1992-2000. I heard someone–Mike Schlesinger maybe??–was willing to bet a lot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10 years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my student suggests below.

Translation: BBC has seized on one year “cooling” and ignores the issue of time lags in the global climate system. As I tried to point out in the Munk Debates, climate modelling is not about a one year at a time climb in temperatures. It is significant at the level of decades.

You have to grasp time lags. The GHG we release today will have an impact on the climate for the next 100 years. The system is nearly infinitely large and complex, with land heating faster than oceans. As well, there can be confounding factors – sunspots on 11 year cycles or El Nino (referred to in the East Anglia emails as “ENSO” El Nino Southern Oscillations) that heat things up, volcanoes (like Mount Pinatubo or sulphate and particulates from burning coal that ironically) can act to mask the warming trend. These impacts are temporary and the climate models seek to screen them and see what anthropogenic forcing is doing to the climate. All the models for decades have shown that it is impossible to produce the warming trends the planet has seen when you exclude anthropogenic forcing.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth from the Boulder, Colorado National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) replied to Schneider. He has been for some time interested in better methods to account for the physics of the issues: where does the heat go when trapped at the earth’s surface by warming gases.

His work is described on the NARC website as “being used to validate coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models and understanding heat flows that are so important in climate change. He has continued to improve estimates of the global hydrological cycle. A particular focus is on changes in precipitation type, frequency, intensity and amount, and thus on how droughts and floods, and climate extremes change.”

In other words, in the following email, he is promoting is own area of research, not attacking the fundamentals of climate science.

The oft-quoted email sentence from his message of October 13, 2009 said:

Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Centre at Pennsylvania State, replied the next day,

Kevin, that’s an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense, we can “explain” it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models. I’m not sure that this has been addressed–has it? Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division, also at NCAR, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote:

Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin’s energy work.

Kevin says … “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”.

I do not agree with this.

Tom.

(Emphasis added)

Other scientists point out that we are still not clear on how many sulfates are being emitted, particularly in the rapidly industrializing developing world. It is clear that sulfates (particulates) provide a cooling effect, even while carbon dioxide levels keep growing. In another post, the scientists discuss why NASA results show higher global temperature than the Hadley results from the UK. One conclusion is that the Hadley data does not have as many Arctic data points. Warming in the Arctic is 2-3 times faster than the global average.

By the next day, October 14, Trenberth writes that he is not challenging anyone, just making a point about the fact his area of research needs more attention.

In an open letter defending the East Anglia scientists (December 3, 2009), he wrote:

I am proud of what Phil and I did for Chapter 3 in AR4, and it is disappointing that the IPCC has not been more forthright in standing up for its procedures.

Dr. Trenberth’s private email is being distorted and touted globally as some sort of “smoking gun”, or to hear the industry-funded Pat Michaels “a mushroom cloud.”

There is no “smoking gun” here. It reads, as do all the email threads on closer examination, as scientists exchanging candid, off-hand, messages. They know each other well and often speak in short-hand. Clearly Dr. Trenberth is NOT arguing that the models have been cooked up to avoid a climate cooling trend. Nor is he denying that there is an urgent need to reduce GHG. He wants to see a clearer understanding of the energy dynamics on the planet.

Sadly, I see it has taken three pages of text to counter the one sentence “How come you missed the one where they cannot account for the current cooling?”

For JR’s other points, forgive me for just replying without copying and pasting in all the emails. There was no effort to “blackball journals.” There WAS a sad realization that one journal, in particular, had ceased to exercise the appropriate level of scientific rigour. It was publishing papers that could not have passed peer review anywhere else. The CRU emails did no object to the publication of the paper because the scientists disliked the authors or their conclusions, but because obvious and large mistakes had been made. “Shoddy work” was an apt description.

The journal, Energy and Environment, was discussed on a number of emails, especially after it published a terrible paper by Baliunas and Soon. The group of scientists, whose emails make up most of what was stolen, decided to put a serious peer-reviewed effort into debunking that article. The Energy and Environment Journal is not a top journal. It is not included in Journal Citation Reports which covers the top 6,000 journals. The name of the editor rang a bell. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, who is mentioned by the scientists concerned about the sloppiness of the work, was the source of a key footnote in Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg claimed that negotiations to arrest climate change were driven “not, as you may have thought, [by] the prospect of possibleglobal warming” but by windmill manufacturers, climate researchers and other “institutionalized interests.” His source? Solely her name. No published article. Nothing. Just Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.

The data problems plague people in many areas of science. Techy issues with computers and managing different platforms etc could drive a sane man mad. If this were a serious problem at East Anglia, clearly other scientists would not have the same results using their own systems and intellectual property to put the raw data into computer friendly formats.

The key point here is that the raw data (at least 95% of it) is available in the public domain, and has been for years. Independent scientists all around the world, sliced and diced in a wide variety of ways, keep pointing out that the planet has never had as much carbon dioxide in one million years, nor has it been this warm in the last 1,000 years.

Turning to another critic of my post:

In this instance it appears that this case will certainly be changing from Hackergate back to Climategate. As it turns out, the source of the information in the e-mails and the data files at CRU is an employee at CRU Hadley. This individual is now in contact with Steve McIntyre over at ClimateAudit. The mole has even shared a highly sensitive data file that McIntyre requested under British FOIA laws but was denied. The data file contains all of the station data from around the world (unaltered) that McIntyre tried to get for quite some time. To show how quickly this issue is disintegrating in the UK, the Met (the UK’s equivalent to the U.S. National Weather Service) is opening up all of their data and investigating the last 160 years of world temps de novo. This will take until sometime in 2012. That’s quite a while. In the mean time I am watching the sea ice data in the Arctic blow right past the last few years. The sea ice returneth despite what you may have seen or heard on TV or radio.

DJ

“The ice returneth?” That’s quite the claim. Quiksat imagery has shown a continuing of the dramatic trend towards thinning ice. Much of the multi year ice is now gone in the Arctic. Areal extent was a little larger than 2007 in both 2008 and 2009. But,

volume was way down and both 2008 and 2009. There was some hope, blown up by the ironically named “Friends of Science,” that a small recovery in annual ice would support some polar bears, but Dr. David Barber of University of Manitoba, made a voyage to check and found the whole area was like “swiss cheese,” or “rotten.”

The millions of square kilometres of disappearing Arctic ice are visible through satellite data. Visible in photographs from outer space. So would you have us believe that those wily scientists at East Anglia has intercepted satellite images and doctored with the photos? Or maybe there are no satellites! Maybe they just use a sound studio outside Norwich and have a planet earth look-alike that they can film as though they were in space!

As for the idea that an “insider” stole the emails, I suppose anything is possible. But the credibility of this claim is more than a bit undermined by alleging the “mole” to be “an employee at CRU Hadley.” Fascinating that. CRU is the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia located in Norwich. No connection whatsoever to the Hadley Centre of the British Government in Exeter. (Established by the wild-eyed radical, Margaret Thatcher.)

None of this means that we should be dismayed there is an investigation underway. Failing to hold a full investigation will only allow the climate denier crowd and the Fossil Fuel Lobby to attack the science and use a few intemperate, overly human outbursts by good and honest men, to hurt the legitimacy of their work. But we should be prepared.

There will be more emails stolen. More scientists attacked. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for the investigation of the CRU emails to be completed. Nor should we think for one moment that a full investigation of the CRU that exonerates the scientists will end the matter. The climate denial-contrarian effort is well-funded and fuelled with rampant paranoia, fears of global government (how do we get them interested in the WTO instead?), conspiracy theories and a deeply held commitment to NOT accept the clear science.

There is no way to reach those people, but there are some legitimately confused members of the public. They want someone to be clear about what it going on. That is our job as Greens.

Defend scientists who have done nothing wrong. Work for an effective treaty at Copenhagen. Ensure that we avoid runaway global warming by demanding cuts sufficient to, at least, stop the rise in global GHG by 2015-2016.

We have a lot of work to do. Sadly, now, some of our time must be spent in rear-guard actions to protect the truth. .

Previous Comments

… is nothing to do with blogospheric sniping at climate science. (which is just a bunch of guys talking in between actual work)

The problem you have is that despite the fact that you have assembled all this power at Copenhagen, nothing will be accomplished because every single politician there runs on narrow national,local and personal self interest. Everything else is just words.

It will all add up to less than nothing when we look back at it. But on the plus side the limo drivers, the hundreds of private jet pilots and the hotels of Copenhagen and their top end caterers will make a very pretty penny. Good for them.

I am so impressed that Elizabeth May first took the time to actually read all the emails, and equally that she has taken even more time to respond so politely and thoroughly to the contrarians. I truly do hope that each and every one of the deniers will have to look into the eyes of their children and grand children and be held to account. They have a great deal to answer for. And no, I am not a member of the Green Party, or of any other.

Yes I do, and I do not want them to be burdoned with having their incomes raped by some scheme that is nothing more than a wealth redistribution agenda which will favor mulitnational corporations and make us poorer.

Provide evidence that a warmer climate it a bad climate, since every single warm period in all of geological history, was good to the biota and recently good for humanity (RWPMWP).

The evidence is out there in peer-reviewed journals. Please refer to those peer-reviewed journals papers which support your position.

Now enters the argument from JR that’s there’s a huge world-wide conspiracy keeping the evidence from reaching quality peer-review journals. He cites partial segments of emails featuring scientists outset about lousy research nevertheless being published. Note that they don’t fret about “the truth getting out.” They point out how poor the work is by empirically deconstructing it. Lot of effort for a conspiracy supposedly based on poor science.

Image what would happen if scientist reacted to poor published research by shying away from those journals that published the crap? My God, competition would actually lead to journals having very strict acceptance guidelines. The by-product of that would be that only the best research makes it in the best journals.

What a sorry blow for science that would be! <– That’s sarcasm, of course. Wouldn’t want my comments misconstrued. There seems to be a lot of that going around these days.

I, for one, am glad that scientist stand up and try to do something about junk science.

JR, as you claim to be technically minded, here’s a takedown by Deltoid you should read: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.php

I had no trouble with it. I write fudge code every day. Need it to proof algorithms. Only the ignorant can make honestly something out of such things.

But for someone claiming 30 years of experience, well, that doesn’t bode well for you, does it?

JR said: “I do not want them to be burdoned with having their incomes raped by some scheme that is nothing more than a wealth redistribution
agenda”

You are making a political interpretation, I see. I make policy choices based on facts, not my personal politics.

Indeed, I left conservatism several years and became a libertarian green (independent, not in any party) because the facts behind pollution and climate change made it clear that neoliberalism was a growing failure. You’d be surprised about how many former Reformers saw the ‘green’ and crossed over.

Libertarians largely accepted the need for police forces to aid in social cohesion, as opposed to sticking to ‘hue and cry’, because they came to recognize that private conflicts between individuals often did not resolve in an equitable matter, and would affect persons not involved in the conflict.

Well, likewise, private commerce is unfortunately yielding tremendous external effects, which are affecting people not involved or benefiting from those transactions.

Those serious externalities are pollution, war and global warming.

As for redistributing wealth, are you referring to the recent spat of private corporations receiving massive influxes of public money? Socialize losses, privatize profits. And to think that Bush pushed hard for it.

JR: “wealth redistribution agenda which will favor mulitnational corporations and make us poorer.”

Then why are the multinationals – except for the insurance companies and banks – funding the propaganda mills like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Hudson Institute, and so on, plus people like Marc Morano and Steve Millroy, to produce reams of anti-global-warming propaganda?

It’s only lousy in their OPINION. And science is not done by OPINION. It is done with evidence. Regardless this tactic to prevent other scientists from publishing is not tollerated in other sciences. These guys did not need to resort to conspiricy to stop a paper. That’s not ethical, and many other scientists agree with that.

You rebut a paper by writing a paper presenting evidence against the former paper. You absolutely DONOT attempt to circumvent the scientific process by pressuring journals. That’s highly unethical and damaging to science.

If this was happening to your people you would be saying EXACTLY the same thinh I am.

“You are making a political interpretation, I see. I make policy choices based on facts, not my personal politics. ”

Forcing the west to pay for past “sins” and giving billions to developing countries is political. You people did that not me.

“Then why are the multinationals – except for the insurance companies and banks – funding the propaganda mills like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Hudson Institute, and so on, plus people like Marc Morano and Steve Millroy, to produce reams of anti-global-warming propaganda?”

LOL, hardley multinationals. I was think more of companies like GE, A; Gore’s, etc. The ones who will make billions off AGW at yours as well as my expence. What is propaganda to you is feedom of information to me. Challenging is a requirement in a democratic society, or do you think challenging should not be allowed?

Now this is funny JR: “What is propaganda to you is freedom of information to me.”

Best laugh I’ve had all day … I’m willing to bet a ‘two-nie’ that the day the F-Institute, the CEI, the H-Institute, the Friends of Science, or any other Denier Society organization or hack funded by them publishes something remotely credible is the day a second moon will arise in the afternoon sky!

At least one paper (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5762/841) was published on it by at least one of the scientists (Briffa – this was Briffa’s area), so you are wrong in your entire analysis claiing no papers were done. Actually, I found quite a few citations between Soon + Baliunas and Briffa, and Briffa cites van Storch, the Chief Editor of the journal I see too.

From the Chief editor of Climate Reserach himself, van Storch:

“The CR Problem

After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28. July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS by Mann and several coauthors. (The problem is not whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century, or if Mann’s hockey stick is realistic; the problem is that the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given.) It was not the first time that the process had failed, but it was the most severe case. However, my authority as Editor-in-Chief did obviously not cover the publication of an editorial spelling out the problem. The publisher declined the publication, and I cancelled my task as Editor-in-Chief immediately on 28 July 2003.

I withdrew also als editor because I learned during the conflict that CR editors used different scales for judging the validity of an article. Some editors considered the problem of the Soon & Baliunas paper as merely a problem of “opinion”, while it was really a problem of severe methodological flaws. Thus, I decided that I had to disconnect from that journal, which I had served proudly for about 10 years.

Today I am not longer related to the journal Climate Research in any way. Only the review process of those manuscripts, for which I initiated the review process, will be completed by me. After that I will be completely detached.

The publisher unethically refused to deal with the defamation caused by the many “mistatements” concerning the research of many others in the Soon-Baliunas paper. You just don’t do that. As with any publication, when such tremendous errors are made, and when the errors involve misstating other’s research, the publisher is obligated to allow response. That’s not just good ethics, it’s reflected in the many varied civil laws concerning defamation in the Western world.

A reaction to boycott a journal guilty of such breaches is most appropriate.

I didn’t think you would, glad you did. This time I’ll try not to have any typos. I’ll keep this short and to the point:

“blackball journals.”

From: Tom Wigley (1051190249.txt)
“Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not
work – must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually
fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer,
etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so
the above approach might remove that hurdle too.”

1047388489.txt
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.
Cheers
Phil”

Are just two. Others they conspire to not send papers to or cite references from, two journals. That’s blackballing.

Of course you omitted any comment on the source code which has all kinds of commented parts of the code including one where a “fudge factor” was introduced to alter the data after 1961. There are many places where the programmer complained the data was “garbage”. And 95% is not available on line, only the “value added” data is. CRU admitted they deleted and threw out all the original data. See Wattsupwiththat for details on the revelations in the source code. Also a new one on the evidence this was an inside job.

As for:

“WAS a sad realization that one journal, in particular, had ceased to exercise the appropriate level of scientific rigour. It was publishing papers that could not have passed peer review anywhere else. The CRU emails did no object to the publication of the paper because the scientists disliked the authors or their conclusions, but because obvious and large mistakes had been made. “Shoddy work” was an apt description. ”

Is that OPINION scientifically based or based on emotion to keep the faith alive? When I read the papers that these guys talk about I see nothing scientifically wrong with their points (and yes I’m quite capable of understanding what’s going on in these papers). Instead what I see is an attempt by the “hockey stick” team to do what ever it takes to maintain the faith. In any other science, skeptism is REQUIRED, yet in climate science it is not. Don’t tell me it is, because it is not. Any time anyone questions AGW, the first words out of the mouths of the alarmists, including you, is these people are funded by big oil (yet have no evidence to back up the claim).

There are a large number of scientists out there who DONOT accept AGW on scientific grounds and have to resort to journals that will publish their papers, such as Energy & Environment. Sluffing them out of hand is not scientific at all.

As for funding, another red herring. In the past 20 years $80 BILLION has been spent on AGW by governments alone. So if you want to talk money you will lose that one very fast. EVERYONE has a vested interest, especially Desmogblog and the Green Party. You expect AGW will be exonerated, what if it is found to have been a fraud all along? Your funding dries up. Big incentive to keep the faith alive.

Me? I do it only for the science. I challenge pseudoscience at every opportunity, have done for 30 years. I don’t get a penny to do this from anyone.

Lastly, what is needed is to have a Royal Commission to investigate the true science behind AGW. Not the kangaroo court like hearings the Liberals had where only the alarmists were allowed to testify. Since the mitigation efforts of AGW affect everyone, then ALL stakeholders must be allowed to have their evidence made public and evaluated fairly. If you feel strongly that your side is right, you should welcome this not hinder it. Opposing skeptics from being included is not what we do in a democracy.

BTW, I rejected AGW the day it was proclaimed the science was settled no more debate was needed. In science NOTHING is beyond debate – ever. People only say that when they have something to hide.

–edit

I forget to add. I maintain that there is nothing happening in the climate or weather today that is beyond normal variation of 1000, 10,000 and 100,000 year cycles – not one item.

JRWakefield wrote: “When I read the papers that these guys talk about I see nothing scientifically wrong with their points (and yes I’m quite capable of understanding what’s going on in these papers). Instead what I see is an attempt by the “hockey stick” team to do what ever it takes to maintain the faith.”

Well, sorry, JRWakefield, but in spite of your alleged thirty year effort in demasking pseudo science I have never encountered your name before except on this blog. Why should we accept your authority in these matters? The fact that you keep referring to a certain denialist blog as, somehow, a reliable source makes me inclined to look at your contributions with the scepsis that you so heartily recommend for climate science in general.

Yes the ‘hockey stick team’ did “what ever it takes to maintain the faith” viz. the patient collecting of data, looking for the connections between these on the basis of the general principles of physics and chemistry and building ever more refined models. Baliunas had no track record in such matters whatsoever. She is an astrophysicist heavily involved with right wing think tanks.

And about that ‘hockey stick team’ (what wit) Kinne, the publisher of the offending journal, Climate Research, apparently belonged to that as well. Olivia Kinski quotes him as follows in her article:”Sally Baliunas, the Global Warming Debate and Think Tank Scholarship”:

“The growing influence of science on human societies …has recently
caused forces to enter the scene that are not part of the scientific process in its original sense; forces that are primarily fuelled not by scientific fact or argument but by political or economical interests. These forces must not be allowed to compromise or distort established and proven methods of “truth finding.”21

“The second article published in Climate Research by Baliunas”, says Koski, “sparked even more controversy than the first.”.The publisher comments that it

“stirred storms in science, politics and the media,” and led to the resignations of three of the journal’s editors.22 He also notes that “The storms have underlined problems in the
peer review process.” He indicates that this process failed in regard to the publication of Baliunas’s article:
…there was insufficient attention to the methodological basis of statements that touch hotly debated controversies and involve pronounced political and economic interests. CR should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publications.”23
9
Baliunas’s articles were controversial because they challenged conventional scientific understanding of global warming without adequate evidence. As Inter-Research’s own director admits, the peer review process failed in allowing Baliunas’s article to be
published without revision.”

But Wakefield after your thirty years of knowing better you will, of course, know better on this occasion as well.

Mann and Schmidt are heavily involved in radical leftwing political lobby group – Environmental Media Services. So they are just as much tainted then arn’t they.

As for:
“The growing influence of science on human societies …has recently
caused forces to enter the scene that are not part of the scientific process in its original sense; forces that are primarily fuelled not by scientific fact or argument but by political or economical interests. These forces must not be allowed to compromise or distort established and proven methods of “truth finding.”

That works on ALLSIDES of this debate. Not just right wing, center or left wing. EVERYONE has a stake in this. The proAGW orgainizations are connected to other radical organizations that will make billions off this at the expence of the average person. (Enron was first involved in funding the push for AGW, and those execs who survived that now work for corporations owned by Gore. GE is spending millions on AGW as they expect to make BILLIONS bilking their customers. You people dont even realize you will be lining the pockets of the very corporations, global corporations, you despise!) The EU is now a perfect example of this. Utility companies are raking in huge profits, middle men getting hugly rich off carbon trading and coruption in the system is rampant.

“But Wakefield after your thirty years of knowing better you will, of course, know better on this occasion as well.”

Have you even read her paper? Seemed to be perfectly sensible to me. The fact of the matter is climatology is not a core science, it’s an interdisciplinary science. It’s entirely based on other disciplines and there for those other science, including astrophysics. (especially since charged particles from space can affect the climate).

The science is no where near settled. We need an independant inquiry to go through all the evidence and make a decission before we spend billions and push people into the poor house (like what is going on in the EU). Are you afraid of such an inquiry?

“Mann and Schmidt are heavily involved in radical leftwing political lobby group – Environmental Media Services. So they are just as much tainted then arn’t they.”

No they aren’t.

I suspect that you have your information on this point from you favorite source “Whatsupwithat” which might have it in turn from that ready venue for denialists The Wallstreet Journal.

The RealClimate team, to which Mann and Schmidt belong, have come up with an explicit disclaimer on this point:

“Readers of the Feb. 14th, 2005 Wall Street Journal may have gotten the impression that RealClimate is in some way affiliated with an environmental organisation. We wish to stress that although our domain is being hosted by Environmental Media Services, and our initial press release was organised for us by Fenton Communications, neither organization was in any way involved in the initial planning for RealClimate, and have never had any editorial or other control over content. Neither Fenton nor EMS has ever paid any contributor to RealClimate.org any money for any purpose at any time. Neither do they pay us expenses, buy our lunch or contract us to do research. All of these facts have always been made clear to everyone who asked (see for instance: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol306/issue5705/netwatch.shtml).”

If you have a reliable source that says otherwise you should come up with it.

Baliunas, by contrast, seems to me to be heavily influenced in her views by industrial lobby groups. What to make, for instance, of her 1995 claim in a congressional hearing that CFC-gases were not damaging to the ozone layer. I hope she felt a bit silly when the three originators of the hypothesis that they were received not long after the Nobel Prize.

You wrote:

“Have you even read her paper? Seemed to be perfectly sensible to me.”

Well it did not seem so to thirteen of the authors she had referred to and who protested against her misinterpretations. Neither did it to the editor-in-chief to be, Hans Von Storch, who resigned over the issue as did other members of the editorial board.

Sorry, but for the time being I give somewhat more weight to their opinion than to yours. I hope you don’t claim authority on this topic on the basis of two twenty year old articles in obscure journals on some geological issues. You seem to be arguing that since climate science is to a large extent based on other disciplines a geologist is an automatic expert in this field as well. Nonsense. Geologists with megalomanic notions of this sort have come to grief. The internet list with Plimer’s howlers is still expanding I believe.

I note that you haven’t reacted to the acknowledgment by the publisher of the offending journal that the peer review process had been quite deficient in this case.

JR Wakefield, Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate agrees with you on one point: the science is not settled.

“…In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.

But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out…”

“The emails clearly show that the hockey stick team got Von Storch out, nothing to do with the paper.”

That’s false and defamatory.

From Von Storch himself:

“After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28. July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS by Mann and several coauthors. (The problem is not whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century, or if Mann’s hockey stick is realistic; the problem is that the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given.) It was not the first time that the process had failed, but it was the most severe case. However, my authority as Editor-in-Chief did obviously not cover the publication of an editorial spelling out the problem. The publisher declined the publication, and I cancelled my task as Editor-in-Chief immediately on 28 July 2003.”

No leaker has come forward. There is no evidence that anyone leaked the emails. JRW’s link made mistakes, as shown in the comments there.

There are no smoking guns in the emails, despite the desperate efforts made to spin the word “trick”, “hide the decline” etc. Therefore no whistleblower would have a motive to leak the emails, because there is nothing honestly damaging in them. It’s more likely a thief who picked through them for whatever could be spun, without finding much.

The emails were kept for a few weeks and publicized at the most effective time to undermine the Copenhagen meeting. The thief attempted to put the emails on RealClimate. Thieves broke into Andrew Weaver’s office at U Vic and stole a computer and messed up his papers. Thieves attempted to get at Environment Canada’s computer at U Vic.

The denialist blogosphere has gone absolutely hysterical over the emails; which was predictable to anyone who has observed it in action. It is so hysterical that denialists are sending death threats to scientists.

“Never in the history of science has a single issue generated so much interest and controversy.
Looking closer, never in the history of science has there been such a flagrant disregard for the fundamental requirements of scientific endeavour.”

Thank you Elizabeth, for your ongoing efforts to support accuracy and truth in reporting, and for your insights into AGW.

To those who aren’t aware, Elizabeth is also author of a significant (and recent) book on Global Warming: ‘Global Warming for Dummies’ (2208). I bought it last year when first published, it’s an excellent and informative primer and I say enthusiastically that many of the posters here would do well to invest their money and time in reading it.

Maybe by 2208 Global warming may actually be an issue. Right now it is the epitomy of a mountain out of a molehill. The green party would be wise to concentrate on real issues that affect people rather than trying to promote treaties that protect wealthy speculators.

Ms. May, your defense of these emails is unneccesary. Here is the problem with your belief in global warming. You refuse to write that co2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere. You refuse to believe that clouds may cancel out an anthroprogenic signal from co2. You refuse to tell people that it takes 5 years to add 1 molecule of co2 to the atmosphere. You refuse to tell people that the temperature has been higher, and that there has been more co2 in the atmosphere. In the Cretaceous period, estimates of co2 concentration in the atmosphere were 2,000ppm. Today, we have around 380ppm. Sorry, the earth can tolerate a lot more co2 than you want it to. I bet 5 dollars this hack of a reporter won’t respond to my post because it makes her angry that she cannot refute any of these facts.

See heres the problem. You people think theres a giant black cloud of co2 floating high in the sky but it’s not the case. Most of the co2 is being radiated into outerspace, eaten by plants, absorbed by the ocean, i could go on. So again, in the cretaceous, co2 ppm was at 2000, we are at 380. I’m sure all of you hate Richard Lindzen but if you read his new paper he explains that the atmosphere can only hold so much heat and then it releases it into outerspace. And the more co2 we put out, the more co2 plants will intake.

Thank you for the effort you have put in.
It is a worthwhile thing to do in these days of such strong opinions. Opinions that should be based on knowledge. I was going to say ‘should be based on knowledge rather than information’, meaning that anyone who actually walks in the wild knows climate change is real. However, most of the denial is not even based on that, it is merely based on someone else’s opinion. Unfortunately it seems that the majority are now ‘reason-proof’. The power possessors of the world have uncorked the genie of ‘unreason’ to do their bidding and from hereon in the way it’s going isn’t upwards.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.